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"Your Book is Your Book Until it Isn’t." A Chat With Poet Annie Kim

Annie Kim’s debut poetry collection, Into the Cyclorama, won the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2016 Foreword INDIE Poetry Book of the Year. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Mudlark, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program, Kim is the recipient of residencies from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Hambidge Center. She serves as an editor for DMQ Review and works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the Assistant Dean for Public Service. Read more about her work at anniekim.net.

Interview by Jayne Benjulian

One of the things I admire about your work is that it doesn’t always make logical sense—but it makes emotional sense. Of course, one could define poetry that way. Auden’s definition was “the clear expression of mixed feelings.”

Let’s take as examples the close of the first two poems in the collection: “At the center of my life I find these holes.” (“Thin Gold String”) and "What will it take/ to be these muddy geese/ rising up from the river when//I wake?" ("The Houses I Was”). Can you talk about developing that irrational/emotional sense quality in your work and most especially in your closings?

As a person who grew up identifying a lot more with Mr. Spock than Captain Kirk, I’m thrilled to be told I don’t always make logical sense. Emotional sense is definitely one of my goals when writing poems—especially in the closings, as you’ve noticed. I’m reading a book right now about emotion in music, actually, and one of the authors looks at how songs use musical structure to develop emotional trajectories. Making readers experience emotions is also an incredibly important function of poetry, though we don’t talk about that much these days. We all need to feel a wide range of emotions in our lives and we can’t always get that through firsthand experience.

In my own work, a dash of deliberate blindness helps me to follow the intuitive, emotional path over the logical one. I try not to map out what a poem is doing at an intellectual level. At times I look at a poem that seems wildly asymmetrical from a strictly rational angle, but balanced by, say, the weight of an image, a narrative moment, or an emotional discovery. Closings are particularly hard in that regard. The two poems you’ve mentioned are good examples of closings that I struggled with for a long time. In “Thin Gold String,” the opening poem of my book, I thought about closing with a more traditional image of a broken, frayed string. But I wanted to acknowledge the “holes” in my life, in memory, alluded to earlier in the poem, so I chose a line that parted a bit from the string imagery. Closings should never be deliberately confusing, in my opinion, but they should also leave a little chalk on the reader’s hands.

Was it difficult to locate yourself in these poems as someone with North Korean or mixed Korean-Japanese heritage? How did your sense of those legacies evolve over the course of writing the collection? Have you satisfied your desire to evoke that as a dominant subject?

Yes and no. My great-grandmother on my father’s side was Japanese; my great-grandfather was a North Korean businessman who made money off of trading with the Japanese. Their daughter—my grandmother—married a U.S. soldier after the Korean War, which was how my family eventually moved to the States. Everyone on my mother’s side was South Korean. So when I read about modern Korean history during the Japanese occupation while writing my book, I felt totally whiplashed. I was horrified and fascinated. I mean, the South Korean government to this day maintains a list of national traitors called chinilpa—literally, “friends of Japan.”

I eventually wrote a long poem, “The Bronze Helmet (a Retrospective),” to try to make sense of things. The poem ties together strands about Sohn Kee-chung, the North Korean who won a gold medal in the 1934 Olympics but was forced to compete as a Japanese national, my great-uncle (who was a friend of his but unknown to us), and my own experience trying to piece together these histories. That helped.

For a long time after writing Into the Cyclorama I had no desire to dip into this well again. Now I’m not so sure. Our nuclear crisis with North Korea keeps me jumping on a number of levels. As long as countries are talking openly about bombing each other, I’ve got skin in this game.

Are there specific forms you're exploring in your new work? Poetic shapes you didn't try while working on the poems in Into the Cyclorama that seem right to work with now?

Always! One form I just started working with is called the chōka—basically an extended Japanese haiku form that was used for long narrative poems many centuries ago. I like how it combines both the tautness of short, syllabic forms with the ranginess of a long poem. I’m also experimenting with sequenced poems written in the voices of multiple speakers, using left and right alignments to distinguish the speakers, as well as different line lengths. Because I’m working with one narrative thread that’s contemporary and autobiographical and another that’s in the voices of 18th century musician characters, I needed to find a form that would let me make clear distinctions between the two without having to constantly interrupt the poem with “meanwhile, at the ranch.”

Publishing a first book has, I notice, influenced the way some people respond to me—well, not least, because they do respond. But how I view my work is altogether a different thing, and that hasn’t changed. For me, the first book sets up the challenge for the kind of leap I want to make in the next book. I set the bar higher. Do you view your work in a way that you hadn’t before publishing this book?

The sheer act of writing my first book did the most to raise the bar for me. Over the course of those two years I learned 12,000 things that I’m using now in my second book—some consciously, some not. For example, Into the Cyclorama went through two major drafts before it settled into its final shape. My big discovery going into draft two was that draft one felt tepid—not varied enough, opinionated enough. That plunged me into the painful process of rewriting a bunch of poems and adding new ones. So when I started working on my second manuscript, I realized early on that the parts were going to change dramatically in response to the whole. I gave myself permission to allow sections of what was looking like a book-length sequence to stay in rough, unfinished patches, while figuring out what was happening elsewhere.

Into the Cyclorama also got me interested in exploring different forms of narrative. I use song, collage, ekphrasis, and straightforward monologue throughout the book to construct narratives about my family and my early childhood in Seoul. “Cyclorama” takes that to another level by braiding two different narratives into one poem: watching coverage of the Newtown Sandy Hook massacre and tracing the history of the Gettysburg cyclorama.

What role does journal submission play in your public writing life? Do you have a rhythm for submission or periods when you submit and those during which you do not?

I tend to be slow and sluggish about submissions, sending out work only after I’ve liked a piece for a long time and know its place within the manuscript. This is partly a function of the fact that I tend to write long sequences and don’t always know what’s in the sequence until I’ve made progress on the manuscript as a whole. But when I do submit work systematically, I like to send out batches in many different directions so that I won’t feel too attached to any one submission. Waiting for replies—mostly rejections—never feels good.

Since starting to work as an editor for DMQ Review, I’ve gotten some useful perspective from the receiving end, too. I always want the new batch of poems I’m about to read to blow my mind. I’m excited when they do, and I go to bat for them. Reading for the journal has also helped me to realize that while tastes differ wildly, consensus usually forms about the strong and weak spots of a poem. And that’s good news for all of us as writers. All we can do is stay true to the desires that drive us, then sweat the details until the work is done.

What have you learned about publishing a book of poetry that you will carry into your next collection?

You will edit your manuscript until your editor steals the proofs from your hands. No matter how awesome your manuscript was when it got taken, you’ll find an army of grammatical and typographical mistakes, blah word choices, and just plain “what the?” moments marching through it. And your job is to see the book with new eyes, to make it as perfect as you can.

Your book is your book until it isn’t. Someone once said that you’re never happier than when you hold the final galleys in your hands. I think that’s true. Once the book is out in the world, it exists for readers, not you. The book becomes a thing, a little planet with its own gravitational pull, its own blurry ecosystem.

You never know how someone’s going to react to your book. Sometimes it’ll be indifference or “yeah, I really liked that poem about the goat.” But then you’ll occasionally get these crazy, profound reactions from people you thought would never like your book and had nothing in common with you, who will put their finger on something so true about your work that you’ll be totally humbled and grateful. Hold onto those moments. They’re proof that poetry is still “[a] way of happening, a mouth,” as Auden said.

Jayne Benjulian is the author of Five Sextillion Atoms, (Saddle Road Press, 2016). Her poems and essays appear in numerous literary and performance journals, including Agni, Barrow Street, The Cortland Review, Nimrod, Women’s Review of Books, Mudlark and Poetry Daily. She was an Ossabaw Island Project Fellow; a teaching fellow at Emory University; a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Theater at San Francisco State University; and a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Lyon, France. She served as chief speechwriter at Apple and director of new play development at Magic Theatre. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.